The Brent Goose Blog

This Blog is dedicated to Brent Goose - the smallest and northernmost breeding goose in the World, and the one that also undertakes some of the longest non-stop journeys of any goose species in the World. It was launched with our Brenttags project in May 2011 - funded by the Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management. Blog revived with the successful addition of 9 satellite tagged birds in May 2012. All pictures can be seen in a higher resolution by clicking on them.

22 May 2012

On 20 May all 10 birds we follow by satellite telemetry were still in Denmark. But the weather forecast increasingly suggests that departure soon will take place. According to previous experiences most birds will depart with the first south-souteasterlies after 23 May. The transmitters upload data every five days, and the next uplink is on friday 25 May, where the wind is predicted to come from south. So perhaps there will be some exiting news for the blog on friday ...

18 May 2012

Data from the next four birds caught at 7
May on Valsted Enge have now been sent from the radiotransmitters via the
satellites to Argos in France, and are available to us. They do not reveal a
behavior that is notably different from the other birds presented below.
Instead of showing four more maps that is virtually identical with geese mainly
staging on the small islets in the inlet, I will recall some previous tracking
results, but first present our next bird:

Ludvig is named after Ludvig Munsterhjelm (1880-1955), finnish zoologist and
hunter, who in one of his many travel and hunting depictions ”Sommar
i Norra Ishavet: jakt-, djur- och reseskildningar från Ishavet och Spetsbergen”
(1911) described how the brent geese, found in June 1910 at Prins Karls Forland
(the northwesternmost island in the Svalbard archipelago), occasionally migrated
towards northwest over the Arctic Ocean (thus en route towards Greenland). In 1997 during our
first satellite tracking study we found that some geese migrated directly from
Denmark to Greenland – and in 2001 we had the first example of a goose that
migrated via Svalbard to Greenland, as Munsterhjelm had mentioned. Thus it is
recommended that scientists occasionally read old books – and thanks to librarian
and birdwatcher Mikael Lagerborg, who dug this old information out of the
shelves in a library.

Sources: The satellite tracking studies carried out in 1997 and 2001 have been dealt with in depth by:

16 May 2012

The first weeks data from the satellite transmitter of
the gander Arner show that this particular bird utilises a slightly larger part
of Nibe Bredning than the others reported on so far, including some saltmarshes
on the north coast of the inlet.

Arner is
named afterArner Ludvig Valdemar Manniche(1867-1957), teacher, ornithologist, zoologist and
hunter, who participated in the so-called Danmark-expedition 1906-08. The primary purpose of the expedition was to map
the still unknown coastline of Northeast Greenland between 77oN and 83oN, but
also to initiate investigations of the meteorology, geology and nature of the
region. Manniche contributed with his account of”The terrestrial mammals and
birds of North-East Greenland” that
was published in 1910(Meddelelser
om Grønland, Volume 45), where he describes the first observations
light-bellied brent geese from Northeast Greenland, the Worlds northernmost
breeding population of geese.

It's getting a bit boring - Robert has the "same behaviour as Otto, Peter and Abel" - but just wait untill the geese initiate their migration to the Arctic in the last days of May - then we will most likely see a suite of various migration strategies.

Robert is named after Robert Collett (1842-1913), norwegian professor in zoology at the Zoological Museum in Oslo. He might be considered as the 'father' of norwegian ornithology. Through his own field observations and by corresponding with and collecting data from many contributors from throughout Norway in the second half of the 19th century, he compiled the information that formed the basis for the first major description of the occurrence of birds in Norway, published as three volumes in the series"Norges Hvirveldyr", a masterpiece covering the vertebrates of the country. Collett died before the bird volumes had been finalised, and they were finished by his student Ørjan Olsen and published in 1921. Volume 3 includes a thorough desciption of the contemporary knowledge on the occurrence of the light-bellied brent geese in Norway.

The first weeks data from Abel, as for Otto and Peter, highlights the importance of the saltmarshes on the islets in Nibe Bredning as vital feeding areas for the light-bellied brent geese in the area.

Abel is named after Abel Chapman, (1851-1929). British hunter and naturalist, who in 1889 published his Bird-life of the borders - records of wild sport and natural history on
moorland and sea. This book gives the first solid account on the significance of Lindisfarne to larger flock of light-bellied brent geese, especially duirng cold continental winters. Chapman also illustrates a fantastic knowledge about the birds ecology in the book, well worth a read and available online as pdf file.

This aerial photo gives the first weeks movements of the gander Peter we caught 3 May. Not particularly different from the movements of Otto in the area.

Otto is named after County Councillor Peter Holm
(1733-1817), who in his Forsøg til en
Beskrivelse over Lister og Mandals Amter i Norge already in 1794 gave a surprisingly precise desciption of the spring migration of the light-bellied brent geese along the coasts of southwestern Norway. Spring migration patterns are more or less similar tody, except that is is evident from Holms account that the brent geese were much more common in those days - hence underlining how rare they have become today!

15 May 2012

This aerial photo shows the first weeks data on the movements of the gander Otto, caught at Valsted Enge 3 May. We only track ganders with satellite transmitters because North American studies back from the 1980s had found that females deployd with radio transmitters failed to breed. Perhaps bacause the antanna interferes with the birds mating behaviour.

Otto is named after Otto Friedrich Müller (1730-1784), Danish zoologist who in his Zoologiae Danicae Prodromusin 1776 descibed the light-bellied brent goose as being different from the dark-bellied brent goose that Carl von Linné had descibed in 1758.

Off course the birds are disturbed – but this photo
illustrates it might be a minor problem. The geese in the background is a flock
of light-bellied brent geese which landed on the salthmarsh 200 meters away
from us and on the saltmarsh where we had just fired the net half an hour
earlier 7 May 2012, and immediately after we had taken the captured geese out of the net. The
geese are stored in canvas sacks until they are marked – whereafter they are
stored on grass in the tunnel tents, visible in the background. If many geese
are caught they would also be placed in the tents prior to handling and
ringing. All caught geese are released together so paired geese and any
goslings from the previous year have a chance to find each other immediately after
release.

The cannon-net we use is 20 meters x 20 meters – and
seen from the air that is a tiny stamp on a large saltmarsh envelope. We use
decoys to optimise a bit on our catch success. This year we bought new decoys
(“specle-belly” = white-fronted geese) which were carefully repainted with
spray-paints to look like light-bellied brent geese by our technician Michael
Schmidt. We use modern Northamerican robot-painted decoys where one can see
each individual feather. Further they have an unusual lifelike nonglossy
appearance, which has no reflections in bright sunshine, as old-style decoys
usually have. Our immediate impression from the first weeks use is that these
decoys function as ‘magnets’ on overflying goose flocks. Combined we patience
and our skilled cannon-net operator Jens Peder Hounisen we feel well prepared
for catching.

12 May 2012

Actually it was our intension
to catch around Nibe Bredning back in 2010 – but we failed. One of the main
purposes of the 2012 study is to explore if there is a partial segregation of
the flyway-population in a western and an eastern segment. We have followed
light-bellied brent geese with satellite transmitters from catchsites in the
western Limfjord area in 1997, 2001 and 2011 – and are marveled over the fact
that all geese we managed to track on the autumn migration, flew to Lindisfarne
in England to winter (1 in 1997, 8 in 2001, 6 in 2011) – although we know that approx. half of the
population winters in Denmark in Nibe Bredning, Mariager Fjord, along the
Kattegat coasts of northeastern Jutland and north Funen, and in the northern
part of the Wadden Sea around the islands Fanø and Mandø. It is also a surprisingly big share of the birds
that has flown to Greenland (2 in 1997, 1 in 2001 and 4 in 2011 + two that made
the journey halfway towards Greenland before reversing towards Svalbard). So we
also intend to explore if eastern wintering birds tend to summer in more
eastern parts of the Arctic.

Literally! With two cannon net captures
3 May and 7 May 2012 at Valsted Enge, Nibe Bredning, in the eastern Limfjord –
we colour-ringed 44 new light-bellied brent geese and deployed 9 satellite
transmitters – we hope to follow over the next year.

Tony Fox and Marie Vissing are colour-ringing a brent goose.

Kevin Clausen seems to enjoy that we caught the geese

Jens Peder Hounisen measures the wing of a goose

.. and your blogger Preben Clausen seems to wonder about "what next ......

Your blogger have been absent the pasts
months because I´ve been busy with other duties and fairly little has happened
with the satellite transmittered geese. We have lost contact to most, either
because they have fallen off or because we have programmed them to download
more GPS positions than they actually can manage with the solar power provided
by short winter days around the North Sea.

Status for our eight geese caught in
spring 2011:

Ebbe:
we still follow. The only goose who has an active transmitter a year after
capture. He flew to Svalbard, tried to breed on a nunatak in northeast
Spitsbergen, failed and flew to Nordaustlandet to moult. Flew to Lindisfarne to
winter. It is uncertain exactly when he returned to Denmark – because we had no
signakls between 21 October 2011 through 1 March 2012, but 2 March he was back
in the surroundings of Boddum in the western Limfjord area. These movements by
3 May 2012 involves an annual journey off approx. 10,000 km. The maps gives the
whole route – where the yellow line shows the spring and moult migration
routes, and the blue gives the autumn and winter flights.

1 Feb 2012

At last success.After having set nets 5 times and spent around 50 hours of trying, Simon Foster and Carl Mitchell from the Highland Ringing Group finally succeeded in catching a little group of 10 Light-bellied Brent Geese near Nairn on the Moray Firth, Scotland. The birds were colour-ringed individually with “our rings”. This capture is exciting because previous records of metal as well as colour-ringed birds from this region of Scotland have involved birds ringed in Svalbard, Lindisfarne and Denmark, thus from the East Atlantic flyway-population, but also birds ringed in Ireland and Iceland, hence from the East Canadian High Arctic flyway-population – but we do not know whether this area is an overlap zone or whether birds from one flyway-population are “regulars” and birds from the other are “stragglers” blown over. It will be exciting to see if some of these birds fly to spring-staging areas in Denmark and others to Iceland, or they all move in one direction.

Photo is Simon Foster holding one of the 10 caught birds. The map shows the two mentioned flyways as currently understood - where the orange dot indicate the catch area.

After almost two months of silence from Loff's transmitter - he suddenly started to uplink data to the satellites on 13 January, and it is evident he is back in the vicinity of the catch sites. The map gives the few locations collected in January 2012. The exacyt departure from Lindisfarne however remains unknown (last location over there 21 November 2011).

After 28 days of silence from the transmitter a single ‘beep’ came out over the North Sea, when Steve on 16 December at 12:07 was approaching Denmark 10 km of the mainland coast. This flight of approx. 630 km from Lindisfarne to Denmark obviously gave a burst of sun to the solar panel, charging the batteries to some extent. On 23 December he was located at Karby Enge and 6 January he was observed on the very same spot by Erling Andersen, one of our keen local observers - only 8 km northeast of the site where we caught him last spring. During the flight over the North Sea he also passed the “10,000 km mark”, the minimum distance he has moved since we released him with a satellite transmitter on 3 May 2011. The next two weeks he was moving around the Western Limfjord, including visiting the vicinity of the catch site at Boddum (marked by yellow pin).

After the arrival of Ebbe, Loff, Fridtjof and Steve to Lindisfarne we managed to track their utilisation of the site for a few days or weeks - dependant on when the transmitters batteries exhausted (or the transmitters were lost?). The charts above gives the GPS locations collected during the period mentioned. From doppler locations we know that the birds certainly stayed longer. The last doppler locations from Lindisfarne thus were 21 September (Ebbe), 21 October (Loff), 4 November (Fridtjof), and 18 November (Steve). The different colours on individual maps has no different meaning (un-explained error occurring when plotting the maps with the Earth Point - Excel to KML plug-in for Google Earth).

31 Jan 2012

Thursday 13 October Bryan Galloway, Peter Fawcett and some other local birders walked out to Beal Point to watch birds, where Bryan Galloway suddenly spotted a flying goose with a satellite transmitter. The day after we received an email with this stunning picture of Fridtjof in flight with his satellite transmitter – and the message “Please find some photographs of a Brent Goose which I saw at Lindisfarne yesterday. I think it must be Steve or Ebbe. We had a great day watching the hundreds of Brent geese resting and flying over the sands at Lindisfarne. Suddenly, out of the blue, out popped this one with a transmitter on its back. It looked in good shape”. We could, however, identify the bird as Fridtjof from the barely visible combination of a red above white ring on the birds right foot. Photo courtesy of Peter Fawcett (c)

In the week-end Steve Percival went on a field-trip to Lindisfarne. Steve studied the Light-bellied Brent Geese intensively at Lindisfarne from 1990 through 2000, and have caught and ringed 333 birds on the site. He found a pair of ringed birds – and realized that one of them had a transmitter. Although he could not read the letter on the yellow ring, the combination of a pair where both birds had white over green on their right leg, the male had a transmitter, and the female Yellow S on its left leg, make it possible to identify this as being gander Steve named after Steve!

In contrast to the other birds, that all flew almost non-stop and fairly directly to Lindisfarne, Niels had a distinctly different behavior – where he gradually moved south with a lot of small jumps. His exact departure from Svalbard is unknown. On 14 September he was located northeast of Hitra and from there he gradually and slowly moved south along the west coast of Norway to Skoltafjorden north of the island Stolmen. No signals have been received from the PTT after 24 September.

We so far managed to follow four individuals successfully to their first autumn staging area. With the arrival of Fridtjof in Lindisfarne on 18 September in the evening, all these birds surprisingly flew into Northeast England. Lindisfarne is a well-known wintering site which since the mid-1980s typically has been used by half of the flyway-population from October through December. The other half fly to wintering sites in Denmark – mostly in the northeastern parts of the mainland Jutland. Hence it is a bit surprising that all bird managed to follow through to the wintering areas all went west.

Caretaker was still on Svalbard 3 September. Next locations we have are from his passage over the Barents Sea from Svalbard towards mainland Norway, where he on 9 September at 6:00 in the morning were southwest of Bjørnøya and at 17:00 reached Andøya in Lofoten. During 10-12 September he gradually moved south along the west coast of Norway to the coastline between Revtangen and Hå 25 km southwest of Stavanger. No signals have been received from the PTT after 12 September.

21 Sep 2011

Steve beats them all again. Just as in spring, where he flew almost non-stop to Svalbard, he also made a very fast flight at least from Lofoten down to Lindisfarne. The pictured flight of 1889 km started west of Lofoten at 17 September at 08:00 and ended in Lindisfarne on 18 September at 21:00, thus took 37 hours with an average speed of 51 km/hour

15 Sep 2011

The transmitters batteries obviously benefits from the birds flying south to better insolation regimes, where the solar panels can restore their voltage. Thus the PTTs of Ebbe and Caretaker both began to collect GPS locations when they had migrated south to 63°N. The maps shows their routes over the eastern Atlantic and North Sea where Ebbe settled at Lindisfarne, whereas Caretaker surprisingly flew over Lindisfarne and continued further north to Firth of Forth near the Bay of Leven. Ebbe followed a route near the Norway coast whereas Caretaker followed a route over the open ocean.

13 Sep 2011

Four birds are still located on Svalbard, but now in the southern parts of the archipelago. The upper map shows how Fridtjof who resided on Reinsdyrflya 9 September during 12 September flew south towards Nordenskiöldkysten. The lower map gives the same overall movement for Steve, although he took a slightly different route. Loff is still at Van Mijenfjorden (upper map) and Niels at Edgeøya near Kap Lee (lower map). Maps reproduced with permission from Norwegian Polar Institute using TopoSvalbard

Our study has over the past few weeks suffered increasingly from depleted batteries, and all transmitters stopped collecting GPS locations. We thus only recieve doppler-data every third day, when the transmitters uplink to the satellites. Fortunately Caretaker flew south over the Barents Sea on such a day, and the upper part of the map shows his flight from Svalbard to Lofoten on 9 September. The lower part shows his further movements on 10-12 September, when the transmitter resumed collecting GPS locations.

3 Sep 2011

We haven’t been reporting on Caretaker since July due to the fact that he spent all his time, also after moult, on Prinsesse Thyra Ø in Greenland. Like with the other geese we also have problems with low voltages in the PTTs battery, and thus only gets doppler positions every third day. 31 August he was still on his island in Greenland but this morning he had moved east to Svalbard and was located in Van Mijenfjorden on the south slopes of Sundevalltoppen. Map reproduced with permission from Norwegian Polar Institute using TopoSvalbard

23 Aug 2011

Loff has after his arrivel in Van Mijenfjorden been using several sites around the fjord, primarily along the northern shorelines of the fjord, in contrast to Niels who mainly used the southern parts of the fjord earlier in August. The map shows locations visited over the past week. Map reproduced with permission from Norwegian Polar Institute using TopoSvalbard

Since his arrival on Edgeøya on 9 August Niels has remained in the vicinity of Kap Lee for two weeks. This map show locations collected over the week from 17 through 22 August. Apart from a few visits to Thomas Smithøyane he generally spends most of his time in the slightly higher parts of the area. Map reproduced with permission from Norwegian Polar Institute using TopoSvalbard

Ebbes transmitter likewise have started collecting GPS locations after a couple of weeks where we only got dopplers. He spent the period from 16 August until yesterday in the area between Murchisonfjorden and the Vestfonna glacier.The four lower locations give his movements in the morning of 22 August where he gradually moved southeast and then west, with the last location being from Wahlbergøya. Map reproduced with permission from Norwegian Polar Institute using TopoSvalbard

Good news from the 19 and 22 August down-loads of data. All five birds with transmitters on Svalbard have improved battery voltage, and all have collected GPS positions over the past few days. For Fridtjof these are the first locations based on GPS rather than the less accurate doppler technology from August. Fridtjof is still on Reinsdyrflya – and Steve has gradually moved north from his moultsite in southernmost Woodfjorden via Bockfjorden and the east coast of Woodfjorden to Reinsdyrflya, where he has been the last two days. Map reproduced with permission from Norwegian Polar Institute using TopoSvalbard

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About

We (Preben Clausen, Tony Fox, Kevin Clausen, Marie Silberling Vissing) are a group of happy goose researchers from Department of Bioscience at Aarhus University who will be sharing the results of the Brentttags project with you